that’s whacked

top down vs. in order replying

Tuesday, Jan 11. 2005  –  Category: Musings

Here’s an idea, and I’d like feedback on why this does or doesn’t suck.

I’m torn between whether I should do top down email replies or whether they should be written in order. By this I mean, top down email replies are when a replier prepends his reply before the original body.

Confusing isn't it?
> This is.
>> What is top down replying?

Whereas chronological replies are:

>> What is top down replying?
> This is.
Not as confusing... but then you have to scroll

I prefer chronological replying, but it can be annoying to have to scroll through replies to long emails. I try to fix this by trimming emails as I reply to them - but not everybody does this. What’s more annoying is when you get threads with multiple recipients who then do things in different order:

Bush
> George Bush
>>> Who were the last few before him?
>>>>> Who is our current president?
>>>> George Bush
>>Bill Clinton, and then George Bush before him

yeah. annoying. the thing is, when I’m replying to an email that is recent, I prefer top down because I already have the context of the email conversation in my head (to be geeky: it’s in my cache and hasn’t been paged out). But for looking at older threads (more than a week, let’s say), I prefer chronological ordering because that’s how I can catchup and jog my memory.

What I would really like is to have all replies be attachments with a timestamp, I could then configure my email client to order them top-down if they are less than week old when I view the emails…. but if they’re older than a week, then it can order them in chronological order.

Does this sound like an unreasonable idea? What do you think? If a user prefers one vs. the other, they could opt to always show them in a strict order.

The only problem is you’d never be able to enforce that everybody reply in the proper format (i.e.: replies as attachments)